Gropius by Fiona MacCarthy

Author:Fiona MacCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674737853
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Maxwell Fry, self-portrait at work.

Architecturally of course he was now faced with a very different scene from the one he had known in continental Europe. As Count Harry Kessler had remarked so cuttingly back in 1930, after a visit to London’s recently rebuilt Savoy Theatre, where theatre architecture was concerned London and Paris were both at least half a lifetime behind Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. The same could be said of architecture in general. ‘We do not understand the modern movement and we do not like it,’ a British journalist commented after visiting the Leipzig Fair. By 1934 there were just a few recognisably modernist buildings in London besides the Lawn Road Flats, almost all of these designed by émigré architects. For instance, the Russian Berthold Lubetkin’s early commissions were for the futuristic Gorilla House and Penguin Pool at London Zoo and in 1934 Highpoint I in Highgate. On the Sussex coast Mendelsohn and Chermayeff had won the competition for their beautiful, translucent De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea. But in general British taste was all too comfortingly retrospective. As Jack Pritchard caustically observed, even in 1930 the British government exhibit at the Buenos Aires exhibition took the form of a Norman castle with a Tudor barn, while the main hall of the Union-Castle Line’s new ocean liner, the Winchester Castle, was designed in full-blown Flemish Renaissance style.

When Gropius joined Fry there were already commissions being planned for Isokon, Pritchard’s architectural development company. Besides the block of flats in Manchester on land owned by A. P. Simon there would soon be schemes for a development in Birmingham. This was another block of modern flats on land owned by Professor Philip Sargent Florence, the American economist whose lectures had greatly influenced Jack Pritchard when he was a Cambridge undergraduate. Sargent Florence was a design enthusiast who had first suggested and supported Nikolaus Pevsner’s survey Industrial Art in England. Pevsner took a predictably dim view of British achievements in this area in comparison with Germany, maintaining that ‘when I say that 90% of British industrial art is devoid of any aesthetic merit, I am not exaggerating’. Sargent Florence, Professor in Birmingham University’s Department of Commerce, had a large house with plenty of land, including a lake. Here it was proposed to build a single block of twenty-four flats. For both these Isokon projects sketch plans were produced by Gropius.

In coming to England Gropius had made a conscious decision to abandon, or at least postpone, his major interest in low-cost housing for the workers and to concentrate on what appeared more immediately feasible: homes for wealthy and discriminating clients. A grandiose project was for a luxury development of sixty-nine flats on St Leonard’s Hill near Windsor. Gropius was working on this scheme through the autumn of 1934. The thirty-three-acre site was magnificent, overlooking Windsor Great Park, with a view of Windsor Castle in the distance. King George V was prevailed upon to give his permission for a new building in such close proximity to a royal residence.

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